I sat down with my daughters after clearing up the dinner things and set about learning to play “Magic the Gathering” with them. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a fantasy card game where you each play from a deck of cards in order to “fight” each other - a “last man standing” sort of thing, interwoven with all manner of rules.
I won’t like - although the game has appealed to me for some time, I’ve always seen the learning curve as kind of vertical. How hard could it really be though?
It took us half-an-hour to read through the rules, deal out the first cards, and go around the table several times - playing and dealing further cards as we went, and pouring over the rules like a team of lawyers.
We eventually reached an impasse about scoring that has taken quite some research on the internet to resolve. While I’m tempted to play the online version of the game to figure it out, I can’t help feeling that it’s a game to be played against real people around a real table. If you have never faced my youngest daughter telling you that she’s going to “wreck you” on her turn for what you’ve just attempted to do to her, you haven’t really played a game at all.
I can still remember her playing Risk when she was very much younger, and calmly informing her sister that she was “going to get so wrecked” at the earliest opportunity in retaliation for daring to get in the way of her inexorable march towards exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination of everybody taking part in the game.
She was 7 years old at the time.
I can’t help feeling that “Magic the Gathering” is some kind of gateway drug that leads down dark and shadowy paths towards Dungeons and Dragons. I already have the Hellfire Club t-shirt from Stranger Things - it’s only a small step to listening to Metallica, growing my hair out, and thinking of twenty sided dice as my friends.
Full disclosure - I bought a beginner’s set of Dungeons and Dragons for the kids for Christmas a few years back. We never got any further than the first few pages of the introductory adventure. The character sheets caused more courtroom scenes than Magic the Gathering. How do you differentiate between traits such as deception and persuasion, or acrobatics and athletics? It rapidly turned into a debating competition - and we all know how that ends - threats of “getting wrecked”.